I agree; after running out of data on the internet, and humans being too slow to generate data, simulation is the only frontier left for improving things (training, datasets, reasoning). And it's probably the most ethical one too.
If nothing else I'm glad to see "world models" that are actually modeling some kind of worlds, instead of the term being applied as a hype layer for video/splats diffusion.
Physical simulations seem like next step, but how do you simulate dynamics in complex systems im not sure. Stock market is a good example with many trying to simulate that, but at the end you have to make some tradeoffs in terms of abstraction level you are simulating.
For social backed simulations i guess some kind of grounding will be needed based on real examples, but then the out of distribution cases will need an other solution. As rate of changes in our civilization increases, the out of distribution cases will be more and more prominent.